Ishan Karunaratne

Ishan Karunaratne is a US Army veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he managed a unit of 90 personnel as the First Sergeant's Command Driver and Unit Administrator. His military background instilled a deep sense of discipline, leadership, and strategic planning that he carries into every technology initiative he leads.

A seasoned technology leader and servant leader with over 20 years of experience in software development and information systems architecture, Ishan has a proven track record of delivering excellence across real-world scenarios. He excels at identifying opportunities to enhance internal systems, reduce costs, and boost efficiencies through automation — ensuring smooth day-to-day operations while implementing changes seamlessly and transparently.

Roots in Networking & Systems

Ishan's journey into networking and infrastructure began in the mid-1990s, working hands-on with Linux and Windows systems — configuring hardware, running cables, and networking computers at the wire level. At a time when documentation was scarce, he taught himself by scouring the early internet, experimenting in the real world, and building his own reference knowledge from the ground up. He served as a system administrator for a university dormitory network, gaining firsthand experience managing the connectivity and infrastructure that hundreds of residents depended on daily. Those formative years of self-directed learning built the deep, practical understanding of networking, DNS, and security that still drives his work today.

Why DNSChkr Exists

After decades of managing domains, standing up websites, and ensuring services stayed online, Ishan grew frustrated with the manual work involved in verifying DNS configurations. Every hosting migration, every domain change, every email setup meant opening a terminal and running dig queries by hand — checking A records, MX records, TXT records, and waiting to see whether changes had propagated. He built DNSChkr to eliminate that friction. The DNS Inspector consolidates all the manual lookups he used to run into a single, comprehensive view. The Propagation Checker answers the question he asked after every DNS change: “Has it propagated yet?” — or more precisely, whether cache freshness has caught up — across servers worldwide, in real time.

Credentials & Certifications

Ishan holds a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology with a focus on online systems, and earned his CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications in 2009 — validating his deep expertise across hardware, networking fundamentals, security practices, and infrastructure design. He also completed the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) course material in 2005, though a shift in job roles meant he did not sit for the certification exam. These qualifications, combined with decades of hands-on experience across cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Linux server administration, and full-stack development with PHP, Python, and Node.js, give him a rare end-to-end perspective on how DNS and network infrastructure actually works in production.